The pull toward someone, then the urge to escape it. Wanting closeness right up until you have it. If something in that already feels familiar, you are in the right place.
Short answer: if you want closeness and then feel trapped by it, miss someone the moment you push them away, and recognise that swing across more than one relationship, the fearful-avoidant pattern is worth taking seriously. One hard season proves little; a shape that keeps repeating is information.
The signature of the pattern is two movements at once: high closeness-seeking and high self-protection, firing together rather than taking turns. From the inside that can feel like reading warmth as pressure, sabotaging things just as they start to go well, or feeling smothered and abandoned by the same person in the same week. Recognising it in yourself is the start of understanding something that has probably confused you for a long time, and a pattern you can see is a pattern you can work with.
A pattern is a tendency, not a verdict on who you are, and it sits on a spectrum rather than in a box. Some of what looks fearful-avoidant can also come from a recent loss, an unsafe relationship, or plain incompatibility, which is why the book keeps the line between attachment and other explanations visible. Nothing here asks you to label yourself from one trait.
Instead of asking "am I this?", track the sequence: what happens in you in the hours after real closeness, and what you do next. If the same retreat follows the same warmth, again and again, you have found the pattern, and you have also found the exact moment where change can begin.
Go deeper
The Fearful Avoidant maps the whole pattern from both sides — the Two-Alarm System, the Post-Rupture Cycle, a Decoder at the end of every chapter and 122 real questions answered.